The late romances, often simply called the romances, are a grouping of what many scholars believe to be William Shakespeare's later plays, including Pericles, Prince of Tyre ; Cymbeline ; The Winter's Tale ; and The Tempest.

In 1875, when Dowden argued that Shakespeare's late comedies be called " romances ," he did so because they resemble late medieval and early modern " romances ," a genre in which stories took place across expanses of space and time.

Shakespeare's late romances include:

Although it was grouped among the comedies, some modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances.

Discussing the latter works, Vianu noted that they reminded one of Shakespeare's late romances, while Şerban Cioculescu believed them to have been indirectly inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

In England, romances continued ; heavily rhetorical, they often had complex plots and high sentiment, such as in Robert Greene's Pandosto ( the source for William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale ) and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde ( based on the medieval romance Gamelyn and the source for As You Like It ), Robert Duke of Normandy ( based on Robert the Devil ) and A Margarite of America.

Shakespeare's later comedies, such as The Tempest or The Winter's Tale are sometimes called his romances.

Philaster appears also to have initiated a vogue for tragicomedy ; Fletcher's influence has been credited with inspiring some features of Shakespeare's late romances ( Kirsch, 288-90 ), and his influence on the tragicomic work of other playwrights is even more marked.

# REDIRECT William Shakespeare's late romances

In much the same way, we recognize the importance of Shakespeare's familarity with Plutarch and Montaigne, of Shelley's study of Plato's dialogues, and of Coleridge's enthusiastic plundering of the writings of many philosophers and theologians from Plato to Schelling and William Godwin, through which so many abstract ideas were brought to the attention of English men of letters.

In Athens, in Shakespeare's England, and at Versailles, the hierarchies of worldly power were stable and manifest.

In Shakespeare's day, however, they were considered historical figures of great repute, and the king, James I, based his claim to the throne in part on a descent from Banquo.

The trio were likened to the Greek chorus, and the three witches in William Shakespeare's Macbeth, as they would sit in the snug bar of the Rovers Return, passing judgement over family, neighbours and frequently each other.

For example, in the 17th century cross dressing was common in plays, as, for example, evident in the content of many of William Shakespeare's plays ( and by the actors in the actual performances, since female roles in Elizabethan Theater were always performed by males, usually prepubescent boys ).

For example, in Shakespeare's day, plays were usually expected to follow the advice of Aristotle in his Poetics: that a drama should focus on action, not character.

Nineteenth-century fictional depictions of John were heavily influenced by Sir Walter Scott's historical romance, Ivanhoe, which presented " an almost totally unfavourable picture " of the king ; the work drew on Victorian histories of the period and on Shakespeare's play.

Such plot devices were used in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ( 1601 ), The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser in 1590, and James Shirley's The Bird in a Cage ( 1633 ).

During Shakespeare's day, witches were seen as worse than rebels, " the most notorious traytor and rebell that can be.

Although Shakespeare's Macbeth presents Malcolm as a grown man and his father as an old one, it appears that Duncan was still young in 1040, and Malcolm and his brother Donalbane ( Domnall Bán ) were children.

The three dedicatees of Shakespeare's works ( the earls of Southampton, Montgomery and Pembroke ) were each proposed as husbands for the three daughters of Edward de Vere.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated to Southampton ( whom many scholars have argued was the Fair Youth of the Sonnets ), and the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays was dedicated to Montgomery ( who married Susan de Vere ) and Pembroke ( who was once engaged to Bridget de Vere ).

Oxfordians claim that the conventional dates for the plays were developed by mainstream scholars to fit within Shakespeare's lifetime and that no evidence exists that any plays were written after 1604.

Looney rejected the play altogether, arguing that its style and the " dreary negativism " it promoted were inconsistent with Shakespeare's " essentially positivist " soul, and so could not have been written by Oxford.

Vladimir Nabokov argued that if we were rigorous with our definitions, Shakespeare's play The Tempest would have to be termed science fiction.

Although early editions of the work were published with the spelling " Shakspeare ", after Bowdler's death, later editions ( from 1847 ) adopted the spelling " Shakespeare ", reflecting changes in the standard spelling of Shakespeare's name.

According to his nephew's Memoir the first edition was prepared by Bowdler's sister, Harriet, but both were published under Thomas Bowdler's name, probably because a woman could not then publicly admit that she understood Shakespeare's racy passages.

Neoclassicism never had as much traction in England — Shakespeare's plays are directly opposed to these models — and in Italy, improvised and bawdy commedia dell ' arte and opera were more popular forms.

The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare's greatest ( Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth ) were composed during this period, as well as many others ( see Shakespearean tragedy ).

( Larger collected editions, like those of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, were a late and limited development.

Thomas More wrote that the princes were smothered to death with their pillows, and his account forms the basis of William Shakespeare's play Richard III, in which Tyrrell murders the princes on Richard's orders.

Such Sweet Thunder ( 1957 ), based on Shakespeare's plays and characters, and The Queen's Suite, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth II, were products of the renewed impetus which the Newport appearance helped to create.

The earliest texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th centuries in quarto or folio format.

Eldon Elder, who designed the stage, also created a gay, spacious set that blended attractively with the park background and Shakespeare's lighthearted mood.

Raphael Holinshed also included her story in his Chronicles ( 1577 ), based on Tacitus and Dio, and inspired Shakespeare's younger contemporaries Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher to write a play, Bonduca, in 1610.

Similarly, when Jean de Schelandre wrote about Banquo in his Stuartide in 1611, he also changed the character by portraying him as a noble and honourable man — the critic D. W. Maskell describes him as “… Schelandre's paragon of valour and virtue ”— probably for reasons similar to Shakespeare's.

In 1995, Charles played The Porter in Steven Berkoff's adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, also on Radio 4.

He was " the creator of ... that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg ," in which "... imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates ", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.

Verdi's last opera, Falstaff, whose libretto was also by Boito, was based on Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor and Victor Hugo's subsequent translation.

The Indian Queen followed in 1695, in which year he also wrote songs for Dryden and Davenant's version of Shakespeare's The Tempest ( recently, this has been disputed by music scholars < ref >

The poem also contains allusions to the Book of Revelation in its description of New Jerusalem and to the paradise of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Lucrece is also featured in William Shakespeare's 1594 long poem The Rape of Lucrece ; he also mentioned her in Titus Andronicus, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night ( Malvolio authenticates his fateful letter by spotting Olivia's Lucrece seal ).

Although Malcolm, and not Fleance, is placed on the throne, the witches ' prophecy concerning Banquo (" Thou shalt get kings ") was known to the audience of Shakespeare's time to be true: James VI of Scotland ( later also James I of England ) was supposedly a descendant of Banquo.

Cinthio's Moor is the model for Shakespeare's Othello, but some researchers believe the poet also took inspiration from the several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England circa 1600.

He is also a character in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and was the hero of James Hill's UK TV movie Owain, Prince of Wales, broadcast in 1983 in the early days of Channel 4 / S4C.

Looney also introduced the argument that the reference to the " ever-living poet " in the 1609 dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets implied that the author was dead at the time of publication.

Oxfordians also say that the author of Shakespeare's works stopped writing in 1604, evidenced by the cessation of regular publication of Shakespeare's plays in that year.

" In Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff and three roguish friends of Prince Hal also waylay unwary travellers on the highway from Gravesend to Rochester, a scene also present in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fift.

It can also be likened to a jealousy competition ( jealousy being the central theme in Shakespeare's play ), since players engulf the pieces of the opponent, thereby turning them to their possession.

Perhaps the best-known film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Sir Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role.

His symbol, also the symbol of Wales, is the leek ( this largely comes from reference in Shakespeare's Henry V, VI 1 ).

" Some, including drama historian Brian Arkins in his " Heavy Seneca: his Influence on Shakespeare's Tragedies ," have also pointed out their Senecan nature, as differentiated from Aristotle's principles and Greek tragedy.

Kronborg is known by many also as " Elsinore ," the setting of William Shakespeare's famous tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Shakespeare's poems were also printed in quarto or octavo form: